more ugh

[Another "ugh" to go along with the previous post.]

I don't remember what led to this, but I was settling into an educational institution. It must have been a co-ed dorm*, because I was in a restroom with a couple of guys I had known at various points in my real-life educational career. They're both fair-haired, and they were wearing similar but not exactly-matching plaid western shirts, lending them the air of a hipster comedy duo.

I was trying to find a toilet suitable for use, but, as so often happens with public restrooms, they all had issues. I finally settled on the one with masses of waterlogged toilet paper covering the seat. I brushed it off into the bowl and tried to flush the toilet (which was fortunately free of unpleasant matter as far as I could see). When I started to flush, it began to spew water all over**, on the walls and--more importantly--on me. It was a spectacular geyser made up of both larger solid streams and fine spray, and it got all over my face and even in my mouth, which I suppose was opened in astonishment and alarm. Of course my thoughts immediately turned to e. coli.

This awakened the sympathy of my two friends, who, it became obvious, didn't remember me at all. They said, "aw, what a bad start to your freshman year!" I was taken aback, realizing that they had mistaken me for someone a good 15 years or so younger. On one hand, it filled me with glee that I (apparently) looked young; on the other hand, I felt like an impostor due for a fair dose of embarrassment when they would inevitably realize that I was not, indeed, an 18-year-old and that I hadn't corrected them. My feeling of fraud increased when they very kindly offered to show me around (it also didn't help that we would be exchanging the relative obscurity of the restroom for the less forgiving sunlight outside).



*Really, WHY do i so frequently dream that I'm moving into or living in a dorm?
**I'm sure this was prompted by my intense hate of those odious auto-flush toilets that start to flush with excessive force right as you're sitting down, spraying your backside with a fine mist of water containing microorganisms I'd rather not think about.

some non-gory but brutal violence, and an excessive amount of detail

I'm completely overwhelmed by all the dreams I've had lately. For one thing, I feel like I've only remembered a tiny percentage of fragments; for another, they've been insanely and excessively detailed (noticeably more than usual, which is saying a lot). I guess I'll just start with some snippets in no particular order and see how far I get.

++++++++++++++++++++

This morning before work (in real life) I logged in to Yahoo IM in hopes of talking to a friend in a faraway time zone who's been wanting to chat for a while. Then I realized that I was falling asleep, so I turned the volume way up on the computer in hopes of waking up with the little window-opening noise if he tried to chat with me. That's the real-life background.

In the dream, I was sleeping in my house (except that of course it was slightly different, both in the house's characteristics and the location, which was more wooded). In the dream I also had the computer on while I slept (for the same reason), so I was sleeping a bit fitfully. [I find it weird when dreams parallel real life so closely, especially when I dream that I'm asleep.] I ended up waking up to find that my husband had been there, which surprised me since he had already gone to work and is usually way too busy to come back home. He was trying to sleep in a gigantic king-size bed in a different bedroom (our house had morphed again), and said that he had come home the previous morning too.

That was the boring part. I got into bed intending to sleep some more, and woke up to hear strange sounds outside. We got up and looked out the window, and finally figured out that it was a disgruntled former coworker of my husband, shooting randomly with a shotgun (it must have been a pretty wimpy shotgun, because the sounds weren't very loud). We weren't sure what to do, but before we had decided on a course of action I heard noises in the house. He had somehow gotten inside and was waving his gun around, ranting and raving. I went out into the living room, and he shot wildly and missed the side of my head. Obviously something had to be done, so I picked up a greenish marble cutting board (not something we own) and gave him several solid blows to the head. He slumped over a countertop and I hit him several more times, very much in the way you'd crush a cockroach to be sure it was dead (there was no gore, at least). Then I produced a small pistol out of the blue (we don't have a pistol either) and shot him in the temple to be really sure--no gore there, either. The pistol was just as wimpy as his shotgun--no kick, and not much noise. It occurred to me to wonder why I hadn't found a bigger gun, but this one seemed to have done the job.

Of course after that I was stressed about what to do, not to mention extremely disturbed at having just killed someone (in self-defense, but still, the repeated head-bashing was a little much). Fortunately my alarm went off then.

++++++++++++++++++

Another recent dream involved living in a dorm modeled loosely after my high-school dorm (where, thankfully, I didn't actually have to live). The rooms were very small and the hallways were narrow, and it was set up so that people in the hallway could peek through large cracks in western-saloon type doors and see what was going on in the bathrooms. There wasn't much of a plot, just an overwhelming amount of stuff all over--my stuff, other people's stuff, just all kinds of objects crammed into every available space. At one point I took a bath in some random stranger's bathtub, and the bathroom was chock full of all kinds of toiletries and shampoo. After that I visited my sister in her room and spent some time going through her selection of jewelry, which was a lot of ethnic and vintage stuff. I remember a necklace of jet beads carved into the shape of rosebuds, almost like a rosary, and a curious thing from Czechoslovakia: an egg-shaped container of very thin wood with decorative painting. I opened it up to find that it was full of tiny pins out of the same very thin wood, in lots of different shapes (people, geometric shapes, etc.), meant to be combined in different configurations. I was extremely impressed with her collection.

The dorm then changed a little bit, and I was in an upstairs room helping Curly Sue (who actually had to live in the aforementioned high-school dorm!) move to a different facility. It turned out that she had been incarcerated for some not-too-serious offense and was graduating to a lower-security facility. It can't have been anything too serious, because her mother was there helping with the move, and she didn't seem too disturbed about her daughter's crime/incarceration. Also, in conversation with them I remembered that my dad had recently had a similar stint behind bars.

The funny random detail here is that she was wearing several hats (literally, not figuratively). She had layered two or three knit caps of various textures on her head, and she changed these at least once during the dream. The consistent thing was that the hat on top was always just balanced rakishly on top of the others, not pulled down over her head. I found it curious and didn't completely comprehend the reason she offhandedly gave for her distinctive headgear styling, but I let it drop.

++++++++++++++++++

That's just a couple; maybe I'll give it another try later. Stay tuned for not just one but TWO dust-ups in thrift stores; an anthropological exploration of either Afghanistan or Macedonia, depending on which part of the dream you believe; and an outpouring of emotion for an adoptive father (??).

crocodiles and mobsters cont.

(cont.)

Part 3:

I was now out somewhere with a group of people, including the friend and some random dream characters of a wide range of ages and ethnicities. We were in a big concrete building on an upper floor--it was a very bare, industrial sort of building, all metal and concrete and very Soviet Eastern Europe. We must have been on a guided tour, because we had all entered a rather dodgy-looking restroom (this was part of the tour, not a bathroom break). About that time, I realized that we were being guided in there by Russian mobsters. They did the requisite yelling ("get down! Shut up!" etc.), and I dove into the first available stall. Unfortunately it turned out to not have a door, so my hopes of crouching on the toilet to avoid detection were dashed.

The mobsters singled me out for some reason and yelled something at me. I'm not really clear on what happened next because it was very quick, but I realized that a grenade had been unpinned and it would behoove me to get out of there. I had a very weird sensation of simultaneous extreme fear and complete fearlessness, and for once my dream running was very effective (probably faster and with more coordination than in real life). I ran right past them and out the door to try to get out of range of the grenade.

I dashed out into a hallway and out the door, which led me to a long concrete exterior staircase with no railing (this was probably at about a 5th-floor level). At this point I realized that the bathroom mobsters had let me go knowing that they had companions outside the building who could take me out. I got to the bottom of the stairs and started running across an open space of packed dirt (there were buildings all around similar to the one I'd come out of, all deserted). I knew that there were mobsters around, but I also realized that I had to keep running even though the open space left me vulnerable to being picked off.

At about this point, I think I was caught by one of them, but this is where things got weird. Because when I realized that I was being caught, I also realized that this was a movie dream, and my perspective shifted to outside myself. When it shifted, I saw that I wasn't really me, but a much smaller teenager with long dark hair and bangs. This smaller "me" started belting out a song and I realized, "great, I've gotten myself trapped in a musical". [I'm not a real-life fan of musicals; I find it disconcerting how they burst into song at random times.] I tried to put the movie/dream on fast forward so I wouldn't have to listen to the songs and could get to the end faster, and it worked.

so random

Last night's series of dreams wasn't very interesting as far as the storylines go, but there were some funny details.

******************************************

I was somewhere with my parents, sister, and grandmother. We had been on some kind of outing and were getting ready to leave. We were in a weird, railroad-tunnel type structure (wood, with an elevated table-/rail-like structure running down the middle, with a small space to either side of it). We had almost gotten to the exit of it when a large javelina appeared in front of me. Either she (it was a she) knocked me over or I had already been sitting down on the middle structure--either way, she was looming over me. I was quite alarmed, having heard that javelinas could do a lot of damage. My dad indicated to me that it was my family responsibility to restrain the javelina while they got away, and then I would be able to extract myself (he wasn't throwing me under the bus, exactly; it seemed like the most sensible approach since I was last in line). So a tussle with the javelina ensued, with her eventually down in the little space beside the rails and me trying to immobilize her with my feet. The funny part was that she was speaking the whole time, although I can't remember what she was saying. I was struck by her rich vocabulary, though, and her excellent command of language (really, it was impressive, especially for a javelina).

**********************************************

I was on a _______ (that's right, Alert Reader--group trip!). I was riding in a car and we were caravanning with another car. I don't really remember who else was there; probably a combination of past acquaintances and dream people. We drove up a very steep, winding road in some wooded hills/mountains and stopped at the apartment of a group member for a bathroom break. I went into the bathroom and started out with some freshening-up. I guess I was taking a while, because another group member came in (a girl I knew in the rather distant past) and started messing with the toilet. It was then that I noticed it wasn't an ordinary toilet. To begin with, because of the remote, hilly location it was some kind of special self-contained system, some sort of chemical toilet (she told me it was quite expensive). Also, it was "wheelchair-friendly", which meant that it had a rather complicated fold-out system that produced a ramp up to the toilet itself. She had helpfully decided to start converting the toilet back into the non-wheelchair version to speed things up for me. It was a rather cumbersome process, and--grossness alert--the fold-out portion had been covered with toilet paper lain flat that was soaked with urine [at least no excrement, but still, yuck!].

***************************************************

I was on my way home from work and debating whether or not to go to a party I'd been invited to. I was very tired and had pretty much decided not to go. I stopped at a little health-food-y juice place/cafe on the way home (not a real-life place), and ordered some kind of snack. They had already started to ring me up when I decided to get a coffee too and try to go to the party after all (which I ended up clutching, un-drunk, for a good part of the dream before finally drinking it and rather shamefacedly just leaving the empty cup somewhere).The party was at a house in the country, given by a girl* I had gone to elementary and high school with. I went into a bedroom and found about 4 girls dressed up in bizarre, makeshift costumes (including something vaguely Mongolian, over jeans and tennis shoes). That made me think it was a costume party, but then I found that it was only the host's sister and a few of her friends, and the real party was outside.

On going outside I found a rather overwhelming scene. There were several folding tables with handwritten game rules on large pieces of paper (lots of cross-outs and corrections), and a huge crowd of people participating in some arcane game that I couldn't begin to grasp. It involved forming a large circle (like duck-duck-goose) and moving around it. Some people landed on spots with big, elaborate, ugly porcelain figurines of fantastical animals that were the prizes--they seemed very excited about them and lifted them up in the air. I gave up on figuring out the game and just people-watched. The most interesting thing there was a greyhound in a pastel crocheted jacket--she was very sweet.

*************************************

The last tidbit featured Picasso as a washed-up artist looking to re-launch his career. Apparently he hadn't actually died, just stopped producing. He was showing a few recent "works" which seemed to fall far short of his previous output (including some typed pages--?). I wasn't quite sure what to tell him, but he seemed very excited about re-branding himself in a new, more corporate environment.

**************************************


*An interesting detail here was that the girl and her sister were (surely still are) very pretty in real life, and my parents were excessively fond (to my mind) of pointing out how pretty they were. In this dream, they both had rather bad skin. This makes me a bit ashamed of my subconscious for being schadenfreude-y, especially since I liked them in real life and we were friends, despite my parents' harping on their looks.

george clooney

I had one of those annoying late-for-work dreams last night. I had run a bunch of errands and badly miscalculated the time that would take (as usual in real and dream life). I was supposed to be going to work at 10 or 11 a.m., but still needed to take a shower. In the dream, I was living (temporarily?) in some group setting* with common bathrooms. There were about 4 shower stalls in the bathroom, and I had just peeked in and seen that they were all empty with no one in line for them. By the time I gathered up my stuff and got there to shower, though, they were all occupied and there was a line of about 6 people waiting, including a girl I had found annoying in high school.

That was the boring, unpleasant part of the dream. After that, I was at an airport with both indoor and outdoor waiting areas, and I was supposed to get on a flight to somewhere for some kind of work-related trip. There was a giant snowstorm/cold front over pretty much the whole northern hemisphere, and all flights were canceled until further notice**. I was waiting outside on a high concrete balcony with an assortment of past real-life acquaintances, random dream people, a Norwegian girl whose design blog I sometimes read, and George Clooney (?). We were all leaning against or sitting on the balcony railing, and talking about random things. Incidentally, I was dressed in a very ratty pajama ensemble, possibly having given up earlier on getting a shower.

It turned out that George Clooney was extremely personable and funny, capable of a wide-ranging conversation. He had the sort of dry, punny, double-meaning humor that I particularly enjoy, but at one point he got serious and launched into a rather long, Steinbeckian soliloquy on the salt-of-the-earth working man and the dangers and hardships he faced (I think he was referring specifically to truck drivers, in the context of the big winter storm).

George stayed there for quite a while just chewing the fat with us, and I kept thinking, "he's a great waiting companion, but doesn't he have bigger fish to fry?" At one point he abruptly buried his face in my stomach to warm up his nose, which I thought a bit odd (although I realized that it must be an effective strategy, and that he probably found lots of willing stomachs to warm his cold nose, being who he was).

At one point in the dream, toward the beginning of the George Clooney episode, I was very concerned because I had noticed that several of my teeth seemed loose***. I was very worried, and asking everyone if they knew anything about it and if I should be worried or if it was normal****. No one had anything too reassuring or useful to say about my problem (I think the girls were all too focused on our distinguished companion). Only George had something somewhat helpful to say, and he also reminded me that [in this alternate dream universe] people's teeth were generally spaced far apart (??).

Anyway, if you're ever stranded at an airport in an open-ended, weather-related travel complication, look for George Clooney. I highly recommend him as a temporary waiting companion.



*I'd really like to someday get to the bottom of this group trip/group living thing.
**A relatively rare intrusion of current events into my dream life.
***I've experienced this loose-teeth thing a lot in dreams before, although not for a while.
****What a charming thing to bring up with a very attractive celebrity: "Nice to meet you. I think my teeth are getting ready to fall out."

Hugely Embarrasing

ATTENTION: this dream contains several gross-out moments. I even considered not blogging this one, but we must be honest.

I dreamed that I was reporting to work at Whole Foods (no, I don't actually work there, but I've considered it). I needed to use the bathroom really badly, so I figured I'd go before my shift started. When I got to the bathroom, however, I discovered that it was more like a department store's dressing rooms, i.e. no toilets.

I really had to go at this point, so I figured (gross out moment #1) why not just go on the floor? I'll clean up afterward. Accordingly, I leaned against the wall in a corner and, um, went. This wasn't (gross out moment #2) just going "number one" either, if you get my drift.

So, now I had to clean up my mess. I found some paper towels and started to clean up, but I was keeping an eye on the clock, which was inching closer to 3 p.m., the time I was supposed to start work. At this point, the whole thing just got out of hand.

Every time I tried to initiate a part of the cleanup process, the mess spread to something else. I continued trying to clean up the floor with paper towels, but somehow, I managed to forget that I'd laid my keys and wallet on the floor nearby, and in my cleaning efforts, I'd managed to get the mess onto them. Then, in the course of cleaning other things, I forgot about the keys and put them into my pocket, which was gross.

At one point, I even managed to contaminate an enormous pile of fruits and vegetables: kale, bananas, carrots, apples, onions. I started trying to wash each one, but realized the futility of this effort. I ended up piling them into one of those coffin-sized rolling beer coolers to take care of later. The mess was all-encompassing and seemed to be expanding: all over the floor, the walls, and my hands, the pile of produce.

By this point, after piling the produce into the cooler, I realized that it was 3:08, which meant that I was late to work, but I still had to wash my hands.

I was so exhausted from worry and frantic (and futile) cleaning that I think I woke myself up at this point.

get thee to a nunnery!

I had an interesting variation on the back-to-school/moving-into-a-dorm dream last night: I dreamed that I was going to be living in a convent! I wasn't actually planning on becoming a nun, but I was planning on living there for a year or so and studying. There were actually two convents side by side. One was modern, with great facilities and possibly a somewhat different theological orientation (although I'm not sure about that; maybe I was just going by the cushier environment). The one I was going to stay in, though, was pretty rudimentary, to the point of not even having hot water (?!). There was some uncertainty at first about which convent was in charge of my course of study, and I was a little disappointed to find that I would be in the primitive one. But then it occurred to me that I could view this as a supplement to my year of intense spiritual study and it would be very bracing and back-to-basics.

My husband* drove me and my belongings there to move into the dorm, and after some confusion about parking, we ended up parking on a nice flagstone patio that I'm pretty sure was not intended for parking (the flower pots and seating were a tip-off). We found my room and I started arranging my things; the rooms were more pleasant than I would have thought after seeing their primitive bathroom setup. My roommate was a Norwegian girl whose blog and flickr stream I sometimes visit, and she seemed very nice, so I was getting excited about my school year.

Just before waking up, I was talking to the person responsible for assigning work in the convent. He was telling me that I would be continuing my present job during the year, but launched into an ominous-sounding spiel about having "reevaluated the salary", and "in view of the present financial situation we have concluded..."--and then I woke up before I could find out how much (or rather how little) they were going to pay me. My husband pushed his snooze button and I tried halfheartedly to get myself back into the dream so I could end the suspense, but it didn't work.


*I find it highly amusing that my husband was cheerfully and supportively dropping me off for a year of separation in a convent.

Snippets

This morning I have a nasty cold--curse distance-run-induced immune-drop, coupled with sleeping only on planes/in airports the next day! Anyway, I ended up sleeping about 11 hours last night, and here are a few of the fragments of dreams I remember:

• I was at the beach with my nuclear family. I had a bunch of stuff on the sand by the shore, including a rolling suitcase, and as the tide came in, my stuff started to get wet. My sister and I went to clean up and change our clothes. There was a little shower up from the water; I remember thinking of it as a "freshwater" shower. We walked down a long hallway to the bathroom, where I waited for her while she got ready.
• At some point, my brother came back down the long hallway, with a new haircut. It was pretty strange--kind of like what you might get if you crossed maybe 90s-era Elton John with Edward the Vampire--but I thought it was cute. I asked who had done it, and he said "Guess." I realized that my sister must have cut it for him in the bathroom. He wasn't exactly thrilled with it, but it had a lot of product in it, so I encouraged him that it would all work out and be attractive.
• I went to my friends' house, and when I got there she was trying to get the baby (much smaller than she is in real life) to sleep. She motioned for me to be quiet and said that she needed me to help, and that I should sit down on the couch. I did, and she put the nearly-sleeping baby into my arms, where she did fall asleep.
• I was online, looking at some sort of strange uber-Facebook/Myspace/iGoogle/blog/chat thing. I was surfing through people's very elaborate, visually overstimulating pages, and realized that my ex-boyfriend was online, too. I could tell this by posts he'd made in the past few minutes, or by the stat counter on my blog, or by comments he'd left on other people's walls. I was online, too, so he could see that. I was thinking about how I maybe felt ready to talk to him again, though I wasn't sure I wanted to take the initiative. I just wanted him to contact me. Then I heard him say, over some strange voice-chat thing, my name, and something to the effect that he knew I was online. I woke up before I had fully decided whether or not I wanted to talk to him.
  

Totalitarian States and gender-stereotyped bathrooms

I had a rather alarming dream last week. I was carrying around a couple of grocery bags of stuff, at least some of which needed to be gotten rid of. I'm not sure whether I was planning on just dropping it off somewhere or whether I was going to give it to someone. I needed to stop in at the post office, which is where things got complicated.

In this dream, post offices were highly guarded, secure locations--I think they had started offering additional services, along the line of the passport services they already offer but necessitating tighter security (also, this dream was rather Totalitarian State, as you'll see later on). I was at a back service entrance, trying to figure out what to do with my bags of rejects. I couldn't bring them inside with me because of security issues, but I didn't even see a trash bin to dump them in. There was a pile of discarded stuff (a mix of outdated office equipment and just plain trash), but no official trash bin, so I guessed that it would be okay to leave them there while I went inside (and maybe forever, I thought, although I felt guilty about dumping them there sans trash bin).

There was a security guard involved in getting into the service entrance, too, and at first he seemed willing to let me in. Then things got bad really quickly. I don't know if he had actually seen me leave my bags with the pile of trash or if he just suspected, but he got very stern and started wielding the Long Arm of the Law and became very officious in his close inspection of my ID. The really alarming thing was that I realized that it wasn't my ID--it had been switched, planted, I suspected, by him or by an associate.

I don't remember the details, but there was some sort of knocking-about of a relatively mild nature but still very scary. I tried to protest that a false ID had been planted on me, but of course that only excited more suspicion and anger. Finally another security guard who had come from another area and who apparently had more authority intervened and let me go. The whole thing was very alarming, and I left as quickly as I could, still anxious about the items I had left by the door.

Then I was with my husband, somewhere in Europe. The location was ostensibly Geneva [I was talking about how pretty it was and how I missed it], although it didn't really look like the actual city, but more like how I imagine Stockholm or Copenhagen. There were a lot of 18th- and 19th-century buildings, some of them pink or yellow, and open stone plazas, mostly empty of people. It was really beautiful, and the fall atmosphere and cloudy day added to the appeal.

As we were standing in a plaza deciding what to do next, I realized that I should take advantage of the lull in activity to find a bathroom. We were next to some sort of museum, and I thought that would be a good option. I started looking around, but only found the men's restroom, and I decided to use it for the sake of speed (I was worried about my husband getting annoyed because I was taking too long, because he had already protested my preemptive and possibly unnecessary trip). It was extremely dirty, though, and there were two or three menacing looking young hoods in hoodies (!), which made me a little nervous. I decided to take my dog inside as a deterrent, hoping that she wouldn't betray her non-mean nature by being friendly to them [this is my real-life dog, who, being a pit bull with cropped ears, looks very mean at first]. Then I tried to find a suitable toilet, but they were all either clogged with paper or the seats were all dirty and wet. I wasted quite a bit of time trying to decide the best candidate for cleaning up a little, but finally gave up in despair, they were all so awful. I decided that it might be more time-efficient to just look a little harder for the women's restroom.

I found the women's restroom just around the corner, and it was completely different. It was the cleanest bathroom I'd ever seen, everything spotless and deodorized. It was all decorated with purple walls and gold trim, everything matching everything else, and the walls were covered with black-and-white pictures of Hollywood starlets from the 30s and 40s. I thought that was a weird touch. Apparently it was maintained by some kind of women's association, because there were signs (with a corny jingle that I regrettably can't remember) reminding members to clean up, and visitors of the members' hard work on their behalf.

I had happily done my business and come out of the stall when I saw that a small Italian woman had come in (how I knew she was Italian, I don't know). I was nervous that she would be alarmed by my dog and make a big scene about me having her with me, but instead she said, "Oh! A pit bull! I love pit bulls!" and started going on about the merits of pit bulls.

food sculpture

Part of last night's dream was about (of course) being on a group trip and getting ready to go somewhere. It was a large group, and I don't remember who was in it, where we were, or the purpose of the trip. The getting-ready part involved finding a bathroom, getting the bathroom fit to use (some shower-curtain difficulties), trying to arrange all my cosmetic equipment (which, in the dream, was much more plentiful than in real life), and forgetting several times to bring crucial items into the bathroom with me and having to go and retrieve them from wherever the rest of my things were. Also, I had a eureka revelation that I needed to remove all of my travel toiletries from their case and re-evaluate everything before each trip, because I had ended up with a lot of extraneous stuff and almost-empty containers.

The other part was less predictable. Still on the trip, I commented to a real-life coworker that her husband was "cute" [I met him yesterday]. She sighed and started talking about how he had been unemployed for quite a while and wasn't making any effort to find another job, and I realized I had stepped on a conversational landmine.

Then, the trip apparently over, I was at work and the same coworker brought a gift to my desk. It was something she was giving everyone in the office in honor of some holiday I hadn't been aware of. It was a surreal sculpture consisting of a chicken (cooked or uncooked, I wasn't sure), with all manner of small raw vegetable pieces stuck into the skin to make it into a whimsical rabbit-like animal. Small pieces of carrot made up the "fur", and other vegetables were used as facial features. The overall effect was like a very strange stuffed animal, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Should I cook and eat it? Use it as a decoration? I played with it a little at my desk, trying to seem appreciative because she was very excited about these creatures. I tried to figure out if it was pre-cooked or not, and came to the conclusion that it was cooked just enough to be technically done, but still uncooked enough that one could bake it longer to cook the surface vegetables and make a nice crust on the meat itself. Then she commented that she didn't think it was "food safe", and that it was just a decoration that would last a few days, for whatever holiday this was. It was very confusing, and I also realized after waking up that it was way too light-weight to be an actual chicken.

ugh

I dreamed last night that I thought it would be a great idea to go to summer camp as a teen camper. [I was somewhat younger in the dream than in real life (not married, I don't think), but definitely not young enough to be a teen camper.] My reasoning was, "I loved working at camp, and I only have a week available, so I'll go as a camper". I came to my senses as I was sitting in the bathroom, though, and started to panic because I didn't see any way of getting out of it. To add to my stress, I looked down and realized that there was urine all over the bathroom floor*, and the tons of misplaced items (clothes, paperwork, magazines) were getting all wet and soiled with it (let's just say it was not clear and watery and odorless, either). I woke up as I was desperately trying to mop it all up with toilet paper. Nice way to start my day.


*Not from me, just to be clear!

Cleaning, Searching, Seeing, Accepting

At the beginning of the dream, I was riding the bus. I had gotten off the express bus from work and got on another bus to go to tango class. My friend, SO, got on the bus and sat nearby. I suddenly remembered we were going to get out of class very late. At first I thought I should have driven, but then thought maybe another friend, JH, or SO's husband could drive me back to my car. We got to the studio, but the class hadn't started. It took a while for the teacher to arrive. When he did, I realized that the room (which looked like a bedroom) was very messy. I had to move things back in place. There was a small table in the middle of the room that had to be moved back behind the bed. I also pushed the bed to be flush up against the table. I was trying to move things back in place and two other tango students, KS and CC, came to help. I apologized for things being such a mess, for not cleaning up before class started.

I went out of the room into the kitchen to get a drink of water. I ran into two women I knew from college. I was surprised to see them there. We hugged. They asked me where the bathroom was. I knew the place had a bathroom along one of the hallways. I walked them down there and saw my freshman college roommate, JJ, coming out of a room. I said half-jokingly, "JJ is in Raleigh, North Carolina and she didn't tell me?" JJ looked guilty, but didn't say anything. I realized if JJ was there, then the AKA sorority must be having a meeting in the house. I continued to walk down the halls. I remembered the house having two bedrooms on the floor, each with it's own bathroom inside - but they were not open to the public. I thought the public bathroom was one of the doors at the far end of the hall, but the doors I opened were not the right ones. I finally found the bathroom when I walked back to the beginning of the hall.

I walked back to the other side of the house and saw Rev. L, the campus chaplain from college, from across the room. I felt compelled to talk to him. In the dream I knew he was already dead (died at least 10 years ago in reality) and had been sent to talk to me. I walked over to him and he led me to his office. While following him I saw my hands, my body, and my feet in the dream. I made a point to touch my body. I named each thing aloud as I looked at it in the dream, "I see my hands. I see my body. I see my feet." (Saying it aloud seemed more conscious than the rest of the dream). Rev. L and I walked into his office. It was a small room, with a desk that took up most of the room. The desk was cluttered with stacks of paper. The room had a large window, a small whiteboard/chalkboard, and two chairs. We each sat in a chair - the window was to the right of me. (I saw my knees and my hands again.) Rev. L showed me transcripts of people whose names I did not know/remember. He told me these students started with me and needed to graduate. I asked him what he wanted me to do. He asked me to read their papers. He explained they started the research so long ago that many of their ideas have already been made into laws. I got the impression I wasn't supposed to critique the papers too much - just read them. I said I would do it. I said told him I would do whatever it is he would have me to do.

Overflow

I was in a full public restroom. I went into one of the stalls that had just been vacated, and the woman had left her red baseball cap on the hook, so I handed it back to her. I was putting toilet paper on the seat when the automatic flush went off. It went off again as I tried to arrange the paper, and this time it filled the toilet to the edge of the seat and the water looked murky. At this point, I had a dilemma: did I leave the stall and say that although I hadn't even used the toilet, it was now perilously close to overflowing? Would I be believed, since I'd been in there a minute or two and had apparently already flushed twice?

I decided to stay... but the toilet flushed again and began overflowing. I crammed myself up against the door, as far as possible from the font, which still splashed me a little. It did this a few more times, flooding into the surrounding stalls. I thought I could hear people talking about it. Finally the toilet settled to a normal water level and I decided I could risk using it. Just then, my alarm went off. What a relief!

Before that, I had been in a field in a car with my parents. There was a dog that charged us and that we determined must be "part horse" because it was so big (though friendly). A cow charged us, too, but was thwarted by a patio door, or something like that. And finally, a creepy guy came up to the car to offer us advice, but we only rolled the windows down partway because we couldn't figure out if he was good or evil.

It was once we'd gotten back into civilization that the toilet incident occurred.

Driving, mountains, hairspray

I was in the car with my parents, and we were driving by what I recognized as Mount Rainier. It was much smaller, though, and I could see a path leading up the side of it with people climbing. It was sunny outside, but the summit of the mountain was shrouded in clouds. My dad was talking about how it was his mountain and he had a favorite special spot, and how he loved climbing it. But we passed two exits and didn't stop; I think it had something to do with the fact that although it was a nice day, it would be cold and cloudy at the top.

We continued up a winding road that is a recurring theme in my dreams. There were concrete barriers along the side, and in addition to some nicely done graffiti, there were huge oil paintings hanging, like a gallery. They weren't all that great, but they also weren't terrible, and I wondered if people ever just took them.

We got to a hotel, and in the bathroom I looked at my hair. It was very short, somewhat straighter, and kind of awesome. My red streak was particularly prominent. My mom had left some hairspray on the counter, which had an aerosol nozzle attached to kind of a structured mylar bag. I used some to preserve my totally awesome hair day.

I left the bathroom and found a birthday present my brother's roommate had sent to me--sort of a homemade scrapbook. I realized that she was quite poor, and that this was a thoughtful gift.

Slimed

I was in the bathroom of my childhood home, getting ready for school. I had thick, straight, dark hair, and it looked great! The options all seemed good as I was playing with it and pulling it up. At one point, I had this awesome whitish blond streak that gave a really interesting dimension to twisted styles. Then, for some reason, I ran my wet fingers through my hair, and it started to curl up a little bit and get distinctly less cool.

And THEN I realized I apparently had some sort of terrible cold. I blew my nose and there was all sorts of green snot. And then it started coming from my mouth, too, filling it up, and I had to spit so that I could breathe. This was definitely one of the grossest dreams I've ever had.

forgotten words

I had an interesting little snippet this morning before waking up. The plot of the dream was that I was supposed to be working on a large-ish project--I don't know if it was a school/research project, a translation project, or something else. Whatever it was, I hadn't been working on it and was feeling stressed. I was in a strange apartment that didn't belong to me, and it seemed like the inhabitants might have been in the process of moving in or out. There was apparently no bathroom in the apartment, because several times during the dream I had to go downstairs to relieve myself in a hovel-like outhouse dug into a grassy bank outside the soviet-bloc-style apartment building.

Every time I used the primitive facilities I realized with a start that here I was, taking a bathroom break again after having not accomplished anything toward my project (I think at this point I wondered if I were really dreaming or not). That was the depressing part. The neat part was that surrounding the "bathroom" the grassy ground was covered with all sorts of debris, notably all kinds of coins, from current EU coins to more exotic coins that were clearly very old. I wanted to pick them all up for later sorting and perusal. On my last bathroom trip, getting quite depressed about my lack of productivity, I looked closer at the ground and realized that there were also words there. I don't know what they were made of--they were really just *words*, the essence of them, not words printed onto some material. On closer inspection I realized that they were all words that had fallen out of use, and I was very excited by the discovery. I loved the idea that here were all of these forgotten words, laying on the ground. I forgot my depressing procrastinatory situation and woke up still excited about the extinct words.

Fragments

The weirdest part about last night's dreams was dreaming I had awakened and was writing them down in bed, only to have my alarm go off in the middle of it. I was still in bed, but sleeping rather than writing anything, and that was rather disorienting.

I'm pretty sure I dreamed all night, but all I can remember are vivid fragments, which even in the dream world I thought merited writing down. In the dream, I found a notebook by the side of my bed, in which I found a free page to start writing notes. The notes I ended up writing, though, were about an epically long voicemail message my mom had left about food. Then the notebook turned into the menu she was looking at, complete with glossy pictures. We were supposed to eat Thai food, but she had found another restaurant and was telling me about things like the "Germaphobe Plate with Eggs," which she thought "you and I would both like." Although my mom doesn't drink at all in real life, in the dream she also suggested some cocktails, one made with 120 proof vodka and something she pronounced as "shtoot." Stout, I wondered?

Before that, there had been:

• A store stocked with Halloween costumes, now 50-70% off. A mom was shopping with her two boys for next year's costumes, in adult sizes as the younger one could have grown several inches by next Halloween. Another family of three was dressed in matching costumes that covered them entirely and seemed to be made out of a light foam with gray decoration to simulate depth. At the time I didn't know if they were supposed to be skeletons or mummies or what; now I think they may have been tombstones!
• Some sort of celebration, in which a bunch of us were thanked with packages of snacks. I busted mine open, and thought they were absolutely delicious. I was oohing and aahing over them. They were sort of like Frosted Flakes, but thicker, and more like mini pastry flakes with powdered topping. Mine were golden with white topping, but other people had chocolate with powdered sugar, or even apple with cinnamon. I was so impressed!
• My ex and me in my apartment. Suddenly he started what I guess could be called a gas leak; a pipe in the floor by my door suddenly started spewing clear amber liquid, which I understood to be gasoline, all over the place. He said, "Is there a watch here? There must be a watch here somewhere!" He threw open the window, and there was a small digital watch face in the sill. He hit something and the spewing stopped. I cleaned up the mess with paper towels, and then started to sweep. It was difficult, because the wind was blowing in my apartment and autumn leaves were swirling everywhere and turned to dust when I touched them with the broom.
• My sister and me trying to go to church. The church building was empty, but as we wandered, we found a little chapel. It was filled with African Americans having Sabbath school, and they were clearly not happy to be interrupted, although they let us sit and join anyway, for the last few minutes.
• A movie theater with outlets in the seats. I plugged something in. Speakers? My cell phone?
• A huge tunnel where the snow passable to snowmobiles ended. There was an evening train at 9, but we had missed it.
• A dentist's appointment for me. As we were getting ready to leave (my mom was driving), I realized I hadn't brushed my teeth and that they were seriously scuzzy. I went into the bathroom (from my grandma's old apartment in Portland) and started brushing. I could see red stuff around my teeth; at first I thought it was blood, but then realized it was Swedish fish (which I'd been eating in real life last night). I figured I was in for some blood at the dentist's, though, since I'd forgotten to be flossing in advance of the appointment.
  

Creepy

Wooo, crazy dreams last night.

Many of them revolved around the theme of my family taking a trip in our old Corolla, and me being late (probably because I rode to work with my mom yesterday, and was running late). In the creepiest one, my siblings kept switching between being children, adults, and other people). The little boy (I don't know if he was supposed to be my brother at this point) had a heavy, suspicious-looking plastic grocery bag. I never got to look inside it, but the suspicion was that it contained body parts (is this what I get for reading about Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs?). My sister/the girl had one, too. They looked guilty, and seemed to be intending to dispose of a body at our final destination--though whether human on animal, and where it came from, I never found out. Then I remembered (ah, retroactive dream "memory"!) that they had made some reddish mouse that we had eaten, and felt very disturbed about its potential origin; if it had been what I was afraid I was, did that make me no longer a vegan?

I was all packed and ready to go, but I ran downstairs so that I could use the restroom one more time. When I tried to flush, the water pressure was really low and didn't do much. When I tried again, a jet of air shot out of the toilet at me! It finally flushed, and looked like it was going to overflow, but then it didn't. I ran back upstairs, and everyone was in the car waiting for me, except for my brother (now his adult self), who was leaning against the back bumper, looking disgusted at how late I was.

In another of the family-trip dreams--or maybe just another part of the trip?--we were in a big, multi-story parking garage, and my uncle was there. I think his car was a pale, minty-green Honda. I got out of the car for something, and my family drove away! I ran down several flights of stairs and met them at the bottom.

There were more dreams--about touring a beautifully finished attic apartment and cleaning the room of one of the senior girls in my dorm when I deaned (who in real life was beautiful, deaf, and kept her room immaculate), but I don't really remember much.

Helena Heavyhole! Snakehead here!

{This has nothing to do with dreams, but I tried to post here yesterday and found to my dismay that Blogger was turning everything I typed into my choice of south Asian languages--I could choose from Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, and several others that I can't remember now, but it wouldn't leave it in English. It sounds like a dream, but I swear I was awake.}

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Now for the dreams. I've had very few "movie dreams" (in which the dream is a movie), but I've had two in a row recently. The first one was extremely jumbled and irrational (an experimental movie?). There was a child version of Gael Garcia Bernal, and the movie was dealing with his relationship with his mother. At various points in the movie his mother was:

1) a young handicapped girl who somehow healed herself by The Power of [Love/ Magical Thinking/ Ambition/ Creativity/ whatever] to become a dancer (this featured a stop-motion transformation scene in which she moved forward and morphed from a tiny crippled dwarf into a beautiful, normal girl dancing ballet).

2) a somewhat homely young woman obsessed with the idea of being a celebrity. This featured a dream/imagination scene in which she entered a room and imagined herself being accosted by smarmy reporters; this was indicated by her saying in a forced deep voice [in the role of Smarmy Reporter No. 1] "Helena Heavyhole! Snakehead here!" [she being Helena Heavyhole and Snakehead being SR No. 1].

3) an elegant, attractive older woman headed to her job as curator of an archaeological museum in Mexico City. The museum was really beautiful, sort of an Art Deco reprisal of something Aztec, in white plaster with gold-leaved carved decorations. She was climbing up a set of shallow steps when it became clear that she was about to fall down stricken by a stroke. I think the other two portrayals of her came into play as she was falling down, in a sort of slow-motion montage.

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This morning's dream movie was a little more straightforward. Robert DeNiro was an aging Mafia godfather struggling to retain his hold on his gang. He lived in what appeared to be one of those historical museum recreations of a village (at one point he passed a blacksmith who greeted him--this was an obvious way of showing that over the years he had gained respect as the de facto head of the village).

Things are coming to a head, and Mr. DeNiro leaves his house somewhat incognito in a sweatshirt and baseball cap (it's obvious that he's showing he still has an ample supply of courage and daring by going out unaccompanied when mutiny is afoot). He passes the blacksmith and goes down the hill to a sort of family pavilion on the lake. As he approaches it, the light changes (golden glow and all that) and there's a flashback to Happier Times, a birthday party for his mother in the pavilion. When he gets there the flashback ends and reveals that there are some of his fellow mafiosi there waiting for him, along with a couple of hired Young Toughs (not mafiosi and the viewer immediately recognizes them as ignoble mercenaries willing to Do Anything for a Buck, No Honor, etc.). He has a brief, somewhat tense exchange with the mafiosi when the viewer becomes aware that there are two large barrels there that obviously contain explosives. One of the Young Toughs drops a cigarette on the water, and a layer of oil on it ignites. DeNiro starts to run away, knowing that the whole place is about to explode.

He makes it up the hill and hides behind a building while the lakeside pavilion and dock goes up in a huge explosion, then ducks into the nearest house. He follows some kind of circuitous route through plumbing/utility areas of the building, ending up in the home of a young mafioso (who isn't there but soon shows up). He conceals himself in various parts of the house before becoming aware that his daughter (played by Saffron Burrows) is arriving for a tryst with the young mafioso. To avoid detection he ends up having to take refuge in a tiny old Airstream type camper that's been converted into a bathroom. This young mafioso is obviously into interior decoration and has used lots of frilly valance type curtains in the camper/bathroom. He's apparently not as into privacy, though, because said curtains don't cover the windows at all, and DeNiro (now so convincing that the viewer thinks she herself is the one in the trailer/bathroom) has to scrabble around making makeshift window coverings of various seventies print pillowcases, which show a tendency to slide off the rods even when clothes-pinned on.

At this point my alarm clock went off.

{At some point I'm going to resign myself to being the one who adds all the actor/celebrity tags. For now I'm consoling myself that they were appearing *as actors in movies* and as such don't really count as Celebrity Dreams. Right?}

The Queen

It was my grandmother's birthday, so we were going to celebrate with a party - the only problem was that my grandmother was THE QUEEN so it had to all be amazing. Unfortunately, although this would mean I was a princess, (or some such royalty) I still had to run a lot of errands.

As I was driving to buy some supplies (more bread? I had to check the kitchen before I left and it was filled with fruit, so I know I wasn't buying more of that) I suddenly had to pee, so I pulled over at a strip mall doctor's office to ask to use their facilities.

And who should be the doctor, but Whoopie Goldberg! There was a long line of patients, all actually lined up to talk to her, and she ignored me for a while until finally I just blurted out that I had to go to the bathroom. She pointed me in the right direction, but also told me that I had to come out and tell her what the conditions were like because she had to go to.

The bathroom was like a locker room bathroom - lots and lots of stalls. Most were used, and the few that were open, I kept looking and there was poop in almost all of the bowls, so I kept searching for a clean one. I finally found one, but added lots of toilet paper to the seat, which somehow kept getting wet, and wet toilet paper is one of the grossest things ever, so I was trying not to touch anything. And I felt very "dirty".

When I left the strip mall it was no longer a strip mall, but a futuristic Broadway. Then somehow I ended up at a bus stop. The Boy was with me and trying to convince me that we had enough time to run into the nearby store and buy what we needed before the bus came.

We went, but then I told him that he had to go wait for the bus while I bought everything and he couldn't let the bus go until I got there or I'd be really bad. When I left the store, the bus stop was up this hill, and I was afraid that I was going to have those weird dream legs when you try to run and can't go quickly (I thought I'd miss the bus), so instead of running up the sidewalk I decided to walk up next to the sidewalk in the grass.

We arrived at the party, it had just started and I was relieved that I didn't miss the whole thing. And The Boy was wearing awesome graffitied shoes that my dad said he really liked.